On 19 April 2024, the Department of Applied Physics and Technology of the University of South Bohemia hosted the regional round of the 2nd year of the Technical Olympiad. This is a competition for primary school pupils who enjoy technology. This year's task was to build a mobile vehicle from the supplied small materials.
The Technical Olympiad competition is organized by the Secondary School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering České Budějovice together with the South Bohemia Region, CEZ Group and the Department of Applied Physics and Technology, which organized the regional round. This year's home round was attended by 65 competitors who sent 110 videos of solutions to the 1st and 2nd problems. In addition to functionality, creativity, design, technical execution and presentation were also evaluated.
Imagine that you arrive in an unfamiliar environment, among unfamiliar people, you are given a bunch of different things and you have less than 2 hours to complete a task that you didn't know beforehand. Do you find it difficult? So do we, yet that's exactly what we've prepared our contestants for. On their workbench you would find several kinds of rubber bands, cardboard, batteries, string, wood, a melting gun and a lot of other things. After two hours, we took a look at their solutions for functional carts and talked with each participant about their design, building process, and possible improvements. And we were impressed - both with the rovers, the design ideas, and the participants' ability to explain and defend their solutions.
As in every competition, we had to announce a winner in the end, but for the whole jury and the organizers they were all winners because they coped with the task and the conditions perfectly - you can see that in the video from the competition below. The three best solvers received a financial prize from the competition partner - ČEZ - and the winner also secured his/her class entry to a performance of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon at the Planetarium České Budějovice.
And if we come back to the question of high difficulty, we have to say that the judges of the regional round of the Technical Olympiad agreed that they would have something to do with the solution of the problem. Therefore, we thank all the participants for not being afraid, coming and delighting us with their interest in technology.
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